Update: KHOU moved the link to the tapes off the front page, so I have updated my link accordingly.
KHOU has three tapes taken by the muni channel during the 2005 budget workshop. Goldberg is asking some tough questions of the F&A director; Carol Alvarado is also offering some explanations. I don’t know if it’s just the advantage of knowing there was something screwy, but these answers don’t sound right to me. Now I can see some of the questions stumping Ms. Johnson, such as “What professional memberships are we paying for?” That’s actually a difficult ‘detail’ question. But others just had my bullshit detector going off.

But where alarm bells should have been going off all over the city was during this exchange. Ms. Alvarado is speaking of the pro tem’s office handling the budget for the individual members’ offices:

The problem we’ve been seeing is that F&A would have one budget and one set of numbers and the pro tem office would have another and there were quite a few discrepancies…

Council member Berry’s office is described as having particular problems with this, though I’m not sure if she’s saying he didn’t like it, or he was one of the worst out of balance. I want to know how the hell do you end up with two different sets of budget figures? Could it be maybe because F&A is tracking one set of budget numbers (actual expenditures) and the pro tem’s office is cooking the books? Ms. Alvarado and Ms. Johnson agree that they need a full time person to transfer from F&A to the pro tem’s office just to handle the budget.

Since one hadn’t been needed before, it’s to be assumed that these “discrepancies” are relatively new. So is Ms. Johnson’s agreement a case of “because you can’t get it straight, I’m just going to have to put one of my people over there to do the work.” It is clear that this would be a fifth person in the pro tem’s office, but oddly, it does not appear to have occured, despite their agreement. What happened?

And listening to all three tapes, I’m beginning to wonder just how much of a dupe Ms. Johnson was. When Goldberg asked about the budget for office machinery, she detoured off into the minutae of copier paper and being charged 3 cents (who is being charged?). She never really answers his question, and you can see Goldberg get frustrated and just drop it. Then he goes on to the budget for temp employees. Again, the BS detector starts buzzing due to the answers. Judy Johnson started hemming and hawing about that line item; Goldberg pointed out none of the council members had temps–so why are they in the budget? She finally answered that it was really there to “equalize” the council budgets, so that every member would get exactly the same amount of money.

A few minutes later, she states that council members get the same amount and they can spend it “pretty much as they see fit.” The pro tem’s office had the bigger budget because it functioned as an immediate backup supply for council offices that had run out of something and didn’t have time to order it. Rather than charge it back to the various offices, they were just going to absorb the expenditure into their own budget. Various supplies were mentioned. Multiple reasons exist for this to be considered bad practice. One thing, it effectively masks an increase in the supply budget for each council member by shifting it to the pro tem’s office. Another is that it actually increases expenses because both sets of offices (individual members and the pro tem’s office) are now stocking redundant supplies.

I strongly recommend watching these tapes, even the one where Rosie Hernandez is being introduced; there’s more to it than “Hi, here’s Rosie.” Overall, Mr. Goldberg comes off looking like the sharp defender of the public’s interest while Johnson, Hernandez and Alvarado are either clueless or deceiving. Proper editing can do that, but there’s no denying Goldberg was asking hard questions and expected answers.